


Pigment

by tiamatv



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Crafts, Fluff, Gen, Hobbies, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Painting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-26
Updated: 2020-06-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24921169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv
Summary: Dean wasn’t ashamed of what he was doing or anything. He didn’t think he had any reason to be, hell. So what if he liked to spend a little of his downtime just putting little blobs of paint inside neat little lines?
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 31
Kudos: 149
Collections: The Destiel Fan Survey Favs Collection





	Pigment

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DameJ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameJ/gifts).



> This is what happens when someone gives me a lovely, lovely comment that is just chock full of warm fluffy plotbunnies! [DameJ,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameJ/pseuds/DameJ) your ideas put such the hugest smile on my face, and I just had to write something. I only wish I could have gotten the trains in, but these boys decided to monopolize the scene...
> 
> Completely innocent, unbetaed, and you're going to have to squint pretty hard to see the Destiel, but I hope you like this tiny little bit of fluff!

Dean looked up at Cas and scowled.

Cas blinked blandly back down at Dean, his blue eyes flicking just once to the canvas in front of him, the tiny little plastic pots of paint surrounding it, and then back up. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a _peep_. He just stood there, all wrinkled suit and cheekbones and reabsorbed grace, looking down at Dean—sitting on the floor with the bits and pieces of his newest project spread out around him, medium-sized paintbrush with a blob of Color H (tangerine orange) drying on the bristles.

“ _What?_ ” Dean demanded. “What d’you want, Cas?”

His other brushes were sitting in their water jar. Dean was wearing his oldest, most comfortable pair of sweatpants, socks, and a shirt that was missing one sleeve, and he had one leg stretched out, the other one curled underneath him. And he had an Angel of the Lord looking down at him with his head cocked like a six-foot-tall sparrow in a trench coat.

Goddammit. The whole point of tucking himself away where none of the other people who lived in the bunker could find him was _not_ to be found. This was _why_ he’d picked the bunker bedroom at the end of the hall to spread his stuff out.

Dean wasn’t ashamed of what he was doing or anything. He didn’t think he had any reason to be, hell. So what if he liked to spend a little of his downtime just putting little blobs of acrylic paint inside neat little lines? There was nothing the fuck wrong with it. It was really weirdly satisfying, watching the tiny little blobs of color turn into shapes, and then into spans and stretches of shading, and then, finally, into a _picture_. It wasn’t a photograph, there were parts where the colors had blurred together because they’d still been wet, sometimes the paint was a little too dry and streaky. His first one, leaning against the wall, was pretty much a mess by anyone’s standards. Sometimes he still went a little over the lines. Once, the heel of his hand smeared Color G across Color B.

But it still felt like _making_ something, something harmless and bright and colorful, and Dean Winchester wasn’t someone who made things, he broke them.

It occurred to Dean that he could probably tell Cas that he was putting together some kind of monster-catching sigil. He’d probably even believe it. Hell, Cas would probably offer to _help_.

“I was looking for you. That’s very nice,” Cas told him, before Dean decided what he actually wanted to say.

“What? No, it’s just freakin’ paint by number, Cas,” Dean muttered, and dropped his paintbrush back into the water jar, watching orange diffuse out through water already the color of sunflowers from Color G, a little earlier. What the hell. Who cared. _Cas_ definitely wasn’t gonna care. “Anyway. What is it? You got a case or something?”

“No, I was just…” he trailed off. “Paint by…?” Cas stepped closer and squinted at Dean’s project. “Oh. I see. Oh!” Dean definitely did not expect the bright smile that curved Cas’s lips, dimples dipping into both cheeks under his eternal scruff. “That’s _lovely_. You are very creative.”

Dean frowned at him. If he hadn’t known better—if it had been anyone else—he’d have thought Cas was being sarcastic. Except Cas _knew_ how to be sarcastic, and he wasn’t any subtler at it than he was at anything else he did. “It’s really not, y’know. Creative,” he informed him, with a little curl of his lip. “It’s just putting preset colors down in little, y’know, lines. Someone’s already planned the whole thing out. I’m just filling in the blanks they way they told me to.

Dean knew he wasn’t creative when it came to anything except maybe burger toppings and ways to take down a wendigo when no-one had a lighter. But even _he_ could do a paint by number.

Cas cocked his head. “How do you think angels were made, Dean?”

Dean blinked. Okay, that’d taken a weird turn on the way to Albuquerque. “Frogs and snails and puppy dog tails?” he joked.

“No, that’s little boys,” Cas told him, calmly, raising just one eyebrow. “Angels don’t have a gender. Also, I’m told that it was more frogs and snails and proto-mammalians that most closely resembled rats. There were no puppy dogs yet.”

One day Dean was gonna figure out if Cas said shit just to see what kind of reaction he could get out of the humans. But trying to peer closely at his face didn’t exactly give Dean any clue one way or another. There were moments when Cas just had angelic serenity _down._ “Uh…” What. “Okay?”

“We—we who are seraphim—were all made to the same specifications,” Cas told him, with that sort of deep calmness in his voice that he got sometimes when he was talking about days when his dickless siblings _hadn’t_ all been trying to kill him. “We were all cut to the same lines, and filled in the same light. It was the same for the cupids, the malakhim, the cherubs.” He nodded towards Dean’s half-finished project. “No different, I think, than what you’re doing. Just a different scale.”

Dean snorted. “So are you sayin’ I’m making angels, Cas?”

Cas smiled, that gentle, almost sad little turn up of the corner of his mouth. “Would you say I am anything like my brothers and sisters, Dean?” he asked, and Jesus, he really went for the gut, didn’t he? “I’m saying that you are still making something unique, and something that only you could make. Even if you don’t think it is.”

Dean was still sort of thinking about than when Cas wandered out—because for all that Cas had gotten the hang of ‘hello’ pretty early, all the other little niceties still went whooshing over his head sometimes. But Dean dipped the tip of his paintbrush into pot E and put a little streak of red into the corner here, where it’d be a sunset shadow for the edge of a cliff.

The next time Cas found him painting—he was all the way down to Color N, now—Dean didn’t snap at him. But he also didn’t expect Cas to wander over in his direction and sink all the way down to sit on the ground beside him, cross-legged, sweeping the puddle of his trench coat behind him.

He definitely didn’t expect Cas to hold out a little strip of something towards him, draped across his palm. There was a safety pin bobbing off a loop on the top.

It was some kind of string thing, but it wasn’t finished. There were probably fifteen, maybe twenty bits of what Dean thought were probably some sort of fine yarn or embroidery thread hanging off it, but it’d clearly had some work done on it—there were about four inches where the strands of black and yellow and white had resolved into a series of tiny knots, criss-crossing to form the complex silhoutte of shadowed boxes across a background.

It looked, Dean realized, something like a honeycomb.

“It’s a form of simple knotwork. I think they’re commonly called friendship bracelets?” Cas ran his fingers lightly down the long, dangling strands. “I discovered them when I would spend a great deal of time on buses. A young girl taught me, on a Greyhound from Pensacola. But I find it very soothing. I have several that I am working on.” He touched the center of a box with a fingertip. “This one is my favorite, currently.”

Dean looked at the array of colors and the complex twining knotwork dripping off Cas’s palm. “How young was this kid who was teaching you?” he asked, doubtfully.

Cas chuckled, very softly, just the slightest hint of a rumble. “She was young. I’m not. But in the beginning she had an easier time not breaking the strands than I did? She found that very funny.” He shook his head, smiling. “I have been practicing,” he said, and there was definitely _pride_ in his voice.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed, and he meant it. “I can see that, Cas. That’s really good.”

“It’s not my pattern,” Cas told him, seriously, and safety pinned the little strip of string to his knee. Dean watched, curiously, as he unwound the ball of threads and started making careful little knots with one strand and then another—yellow, first. Cas’s big hands moved in slow, careful deliberation, and the threads looking too tiny to be twined around his fingers, but as Dean watched, a little strip of white started turning into another honeycomb. “But it is still something that I have put time into. The making of them, the giving of them. It’s simple, but I think it’s a wonderful way to demonstrate affection. Don’t you?”

Dean had his mouth already half-open to say “sure, if you’re a teenage girl,” but Cas’s expression when he tilted his head to meet Dean’s eyes was just so damned _open_ , his smile so little and pleased right now that that little bit of reflexive nastiness stuck in his throat.

“Would you like me to make you one?” Cas asked, hopefully.

“Yeah,” Dean noted, gruffly, and bent his head back to his painting. Color O. He wasn’t blushing. He wasn’t fucking _blushing._ “I’d like that.”

~fin~

June 25, 2020

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't have anything in particular in mind for Dean's painting, but for anyone so inclined, [here](https://friendship-bracelets.net/patterns/103863) is the link to Cas's bracelet pattern.
> 
> [Here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24729514/comments/318040870) is the lovely comment that turned into the prompt for this!


End file.
